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Deer

The soul, the gentle harmless self that is often hurt or wounded by our aggressiveness and cynicism, or by other people’s criticism; vulnerability; the unsocialised or wild, but gentle side of our instincts; love-sickness.

In Greek mythology the deer was associated with the virginal huntress Artemis. So the female deer in a dream suggests the qualities of female gentleness and the connection with nature and the hidden world of the unconscious with all its strange wisdom. While the stag often links with bold and powerful masculinity and sexuality in a natural and potent form.

The Core Self often appears as a deer, or woodland creature in dreams. Below is a quote from Carl Jung’s book Man and His Symbols.

Example: “I am your child and your mother. They call me the ‘connecting animal’ because I connect people, animals, and even stones with one another if I enter them. I am your fate or the ‘objective I.’ When I appear, I redeem you from the meaningless hazards of life. The fire burning inside me burns in the whole of nature. If a man loses it, he becomes egocentric, lonely, disoriented, and weak.”

Example: As I walked the meadow my dog was running free. I felt I must call him to heal, as there were grazing animals about. I called him and saw him coming, almost wraith like, or like a spirit form, shadowy and powerful looking. He was running behind a wonderful looking beast – a mixture between a sheep a gazelle and a deer. The remarkable thing about it was its colouring. There were bright blues on its hindquarters, and radiant almost transparent colours elsewhere, perhaps on its head. I shouted to stop my dog frightening the creature. It ran towards me and jumped into my arms, very fearful, but relaxing and feeling safe as I held it. I could sense it emotions of terror. I seemed to feel what it was feeling inside. It was a creature without any means of defence except to run. So it was frightened for its life. This sense of its inner condition was impressive as I knew what it was like to be that creature when hunted. I also could feel how it could feel safe in my arms because somehow it was like handing over its defence to a sort of mother, as a baby might.

Then I seemed to look at the creature anew and saw that it had a much bigger body than I had first thought. In fact it must have been different because when in my arms it was small, but now it seemed to be about the size of a fallow deer.

In the above dream the man actually feels the quality of his inner condition represented by the deer.

Deer are sometimes used to indicate a sexual longing for a woman – the hunter and hunted. The sexual implication of the deer hunt is underlined by a medieval English folk song called “The Keeper”: The first doe that he shot at he missed, And the second doe he trimmed he kissed, And the third ran away in a young man’s heart, She’s amongst the leaves of the green O”.

In a man’s dream: The deer may depict a young woman the man is in pursuit of, or a daughter if you have one.

In a woman’s dream: The deer may link with you as a young woman, or to a daughter if you have one.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What are the qualities of the deer in your dream?

Does it link in any way with a feeling of entering the magical realm of nature or the unknown?

Are you feeling about it as you would with a female?

If a stag, are there symbols linking it with sexuality, such as its horns or its attraction to you?

Comments

-elaine tucker-haviland2013-09-24 14:54:46

Hi, I had a dream with an injured deer coming to me for assistance. It was in an apartment complex, I went to find help, came back and a young girl had found a man from India that was a vet to care for the frightened animal. When she saw me, she thanked me with her eyes. It was like when I went to look, I got detained by feeding my senses and when I returned, the little girl had found help. The deer’s two front legs had long gashes. I have broken both my feet at different times the last three years, and this year both hands at same time, really held me back with my work. IWhen my feet were inured, I got lost with numbing techniques. yesterday I met some other artists and see how different our approaches are, I am so not technological, I go by word of mouth, they are so “business” ….was the deer showing me my wounded spirit, and to trust cause she trusted me and sought me out from the wild? Was Divine seeking me out? Like in real life when my Hawk follows me?

I had a dream the other night with a deer like thing , it had the head of a deer body of a horse and feet of a raccoon, in my dream it showed kindness and was gentle, scared … on a rear it was white with black spots rest of body was a chocolate brown with big blue eyes… it’s been on my mind i don’t if it means anything or if it was just a dream

LazzzyGurl – Dreams are always open to giving us meaning, though not always easy to understand because we tend to think about them instead of exploring our feelings about them. You said the gentle scared animal showed kindness.

So there are lots of clues. The first is one we usually forget – you/we are animals. We often forget this and do not take care of our animal needs. If we had a pet we would take care of it and give it the best food that would not lead to overweight.

Your dream animal is a lovely image of the animal part of you that is usually forgotten. It is a mixture of several mammals, gentle, yet like a horse something within you that can carry and serve you; and of course wild as well like the raccoon.

I had a dream that I was a doe. I was by myself for awhile just walking and eating flowers. Then I came across a buck and we became friends. It was a very long dream and we walked and made conversation in a warm sunny forest together. But then a hunter was after us and we ran into the dense dark area of the forest. It was lined with bamboo. We ran and he told me he knew where to go. We kept go deeper into the forest and it began to get steeper. Once we reach the top, the forest cleared, and we were on top of a mountian with some snow patches on the ground. There was a cabin built into the side of the mountian. We ran up to the porch and an elderly couple let us in to hide. The hunter eventually made his way to their doorstep. He ponded on the door and screamed to let him in.I was scared. The buck kicked the back door open and we ran faster up the mountian. We hide behind a big boulder and watched the hunter get into his truck and Make his way down the mountian.

You find shelter within the attitudes and care you learned from your parents, but that wasn’t enough to get rid of the victim threat. You finally managed it by a process of transformation which was hard won. You rose above your old self and are finding a new way of seeing things.

I had a dream that brought me to tears. I was the female deer. Someone shot me with a dart and told me everything was going to be OK. The dart made me feel drowsy and in the dream I struggled to stay awake. The struggle was most of my dream and it made me feel so exhausted. I felt feelings of being lied to when they kept telling me it was going to be OK. The person was holding me up and dragging me to some location. I woke up from the dream full of tears and actually sobbing. This was so strange.

A while ago, I had a dream that there was a doe, standing at the edge of the woods, at the boundary between the woods and the field, and she was looking at me…just calmly standing there and regarding me. I was standing in the field. I was concerned that she was trying to impress something on me, trying to tell me something, but that I couldn’t figure out what it was. I can’t remember if that dream went anywhere else or if was interrupted in the middle of it (alarm or whatever)….any ideas?